As too often, still reading this one as the Friday morning arrives...various distractions and other tasks intruded, as we remember the folks we've lost since this Greenberg group anthology was published in 1988...the first anthology credited to Rosalind Greenberg, who has since become Martin Greenberg's widow.

It also didn't help that the lead-off novelet by Talmage Powell is atrocious (which didn't stop Martin Greenberg from including it in several more anthologies afterward). Clearly paid by the word, Powell lards everything with unnecessary description, characters restating what has just been described, either by Powell as author or through another character's speech, infodumps about Louisiana history (real and story-specific), and has characters grow enraged at each other in the middle of dialog for no reason. The title is essentially meaningless, as well. Thirty pages of discouragement to continue. Powell was never the most precise writer, in what I've read over the decades, and he was usually at his best in writing about obsessed characters just when they've lost all self-control...his rationale for this as horror story and its villain of sorts is less utterly clumsy than most of the rest of the tale, but that's a very low bar.

Isaac Asimov's introduction is a pleasant-enough, if slightly perfunctory, rundown of the origins of the name Valentine (and its predecessors) and, very quickly, the emergence of modern Valentine's Day observation. The loving care with which the book was put together is indicated by no copyright notice for the Asimov introduction anywhere in the text, and a poor choice of typeface and even worse page layout, with "gutters" for the binding of the paperback original way too narrow and almost requiring breaking the spine to being able to read the stories.

However, things pick up immediately with a Sam McBride story by Ed Gorman, signing himself as he often would early on in horror contexts as "Daniel Ransom". The Rick Hautala entry is apparently his first published short story; as with Jane Gaskell and Samuel Delany and relatively few others, he was publishing novels for several years before his first shorter work. And I look forward to better things from such old pros as Bill Crider (the anniversary of whose passing was only days ago), Edward Wellen, Edward Hoch, Barry Malzberg, Steve Rasnic Tem, William Nolan, Nedra Tyre (whose story is the only other one reprinted here along with the Hautala...though sloppy traffic control lists the Hautala as an original here, as opposed to in another Greenberg anthology published the year before) and others. And Susan Casper, the briefly prolific short story writer Jeannette Hopper, Tyre and co-editor Greenberg help qualify this for the Women in Horror Month consideration, along with its obvious seasonal relevance.

Saturday, February 9, 2019

If two queries amount to clamor (we have low thresholds here in blogland), a groundswell of Rick and Paul made me aware that though I thought I had done an August 1964 gallery of science fiction magazines at some point (as opposed to their compatriots in English devoted to fantasy and frequently also sf), as it turns out, I hadn't. And, as there's a remarkable lack of photos online of the summer 1964 issues of the political magazines that meant the most to me as I would read them later, or whose legacy would be important to me, here are some images from as close as I can get so far (I did include the anarchist/libertarian socialist journal Our Generation, which in 1964 was still Our Generation Against Nuclear War, in with the general-interest intellectual magazines and the politically-savvy satire magazines last week...in part because it has a fine online archive)(and when a magazine, like Dissent, apparently skipped most of 1964 presumably out of budget or staff infighting woes, what can one do? The 1964 Anarchy below, by the way, is the offshoot from the UK anarchist newspaper Freedom, rather than an improbably early issue of the 1980s heavily Situationist/Deep Ecologist Anarchy: The Journal of Desire Armed)(nobody seems to archive/web-write much about The Progressive in the 1960s...).

If there's a magazine among sf magazines in English in 1964 that was providing the most bang for the pence without much attention given, it was probably the UK edition of Venture Science Fiction, which flourished briefly for several years after the similarly impressive, shortlived US original and in the mid-'60s was the de facto UK edition of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Perhaps an unfair comparison, as it was able to draw on the contents of both the US Venture and F&SF ranging back a number of years, cherry-picking as they might (and this Venture did run a scrap of fantasy...but, then, so did all the other sf magazines below):

And we can note the presence of one of the recently late Carol Emshwiller's stories. "Pelt", along with her nearly contemporaneous "Hunting Machine", is and are strong indictments of the ethics and cruelty of hunting for sport, at very least, and among her many vivid short stories.And to run through the rest of the field almost alphabetically and definitely by how long they had run by 1964:Amazing, during all its years running alongside Fantastic and to some extent Fantastic Adventures, was almost always not quite as good as its stablemate, in part because there usually was more magazine competition for sf stories than the fantasy fiction the companion was more open to...but the August issue has a hell of a lineup, aside from the odd choices of Young and Rohrer, the latter about as new on the scene as Le Guin and Gottlieb, for the cover...and the September contributors are as impressive.

_127 · [correction of Sam Moskowitz about Children of the Damned credit to John Wyndham] · Bill Warren · lt

Pretty good issues (at least the August, which I've read, but the September looks good) of the large-format Analog, albeit light on fiction...but if you're going to run only three pieces of fiction in an issue, having two of them be by Mack Reynolds and Damon Knight is a good idea (Knight's notable story "Semper Fi", which Campbell changed the title of, and Knight changed it back when it was reprinted). Haven't read the serial...I've only owned the August issue, and the author seems typical of the Analog writer who hasn't published much outside the magazine.

Mass-market paperback-sized issues of New Worlds, early in the editorship of Michael Moorcock, and the July/August issue featuring the most famous story of his ex, Hilary Bailey, a brilliant writer. Eclectic mixes of writers...for example, few tend to refer to Joseph Green as a "New Wave" writer, but he's right at home here...and E. C. Tubb in the next issue...of course, the big arguments came later.

Frederik Pohl was probably at his editorial height at this point, as he as getting Galaxy and If about where he wanted them, except not monthly, and was given Worlds of Tomorrow as a sop for not being allowed to up the frequency of the other magazines...not what he was hoping for, but WoT became a place for long novellas and other items that literally or thematically wouldn't fit in the other magazines (though If was saddled with the atrocious Heinlein novel, and had a sudden switch to monthly for the August issue, then bimonthly again for September-October, then monthly in November for several years--publishers Robert Guinn and Sol Cohen were nervous); the only issues of The Best Science Fiction magazines were a bit of a trial balloon...the Best from WoT item probably not released till year's end, but this isn't clearly documented (the FictionMags Index suspects it was intended for 1965 release)...probably the best cover designs of this set, save the August If and the utterly functional Best Science Fictions.

And, for the hell of it, here's the 1964 Hugo Award balloting results order for the professional magazines in sf and fantasy, World SF Convention membership tending to favor sf but not always, and demonstrating the dangers, for Cele Goldsmith, John Carnell and Frederik Pohl, at least, of having to run against yourself...